Drupal Advanced Forum vs phpBB Forum
What are the pros and cons for using Drupal Advanced forum or phpBB?
demo of Drupal Advanced forum is here: http://socnet.shellmultimedia.com/forum
this demo used Blue Lagoon Stacked styling
how to style your advanced forum is here: http://drupal.org/node/234042
For a good example of using phpBB with Drupal 6, see here:
http://www.teenrc.ca/phpbbforum
you can download phpbb skins from the internet
Drupal has module for phpbb. drupal.org forums has a drupal 6 version
I like the style of phpbb for the posts with the author pane on the right hand side.
Drupal Adv. Forum puts the author pane at the top of each post. which I don't like as much.
Has anyone customized Drupal Advanced Forum to move the author pane to the left or right side of the post?
any thoughts or suggestions for using Adv forum or phpBB would be appreciated.
Ical feed
With Advanced forum, It's
With Advanced forum, It's all about the theming, so yes, you can put the author pane wherever you like.
The only reason I used phpBB on TeenRC was because they had been using it for the last two years and were quite happy with it. It worked out quite well with the Drupal 6 integration however it does add complexity in terms of both user and node syncing. For example, I still haven't figured out how to get username changes syncing both ways. If someone changes their username in Drupal, it sends the phpBB stuff out of whack. Once, after using Actions and Triggers to automate some login stuff, the phpBB syncing stopped working entirely and it took me days to figure it out. There's also the added complexity of having to learn two systems and administer the cms and the forum via two separate interfaces. And all the stuff you would do easily with CCK and Views (like have recent post blocks, comment counts, related, etc.) aren't easily done when dealing with phpBB posts. That might not matter in your application, however it did on TeenRC. I needed to create custom stats pages. It was easy to do with Views for the Drupal nodes, but not so easy with phpBB posts.
So though the quicker route to a "proper" forum would be phpBB, if you want to do anything custom I'd go with Advanced Forum. It will take more work up front but in the end you will have unified integrated system working exactly how you design it to work.
Maybe.
Comparing to SMF
I wonder how the following would compare:
My understanding is that Simple Machines is better forum software than phpBB and there is a Drupal integration module for it.
Oh well, throw it in the todo list.